Purgatory Chasm: A Mystery (16 page)

He flicked a hand and made a
pfft
noise. “Throw your wallet on the floor.”

I did, staring down the muzzle of the machine pistol. Without taking his eyes or gun off me, the muscle man picked it up and handed it to Montreal. He found my license and said my name, DOB, address, and driver’s license number. Then he said, “Do you have it?”

“Got it,” muscle man said.

Montreal read my eyes. “Do not be fooled by appearances,” he said, flipping through my wallet some more. “He has the best memory I have yet encountered. Say…” He held up a card. “You are on parole, Mister Sax. For what crime or crimes?”

“Manslaughter two.”

He arched his groomed eyebrows, put the parole card back in my wallet, and tossed it to my feet. “So,” he said—almost but not quite pronouncing it
Zo
—“what brings a convicted killer to Ollie Dufresne’s little garage?”

“It’s right behind you,” I said.

Neither man turned.

“Under the cover,” I said. “Mercedes 450SEL 6.9. It belonged to my friend Tander Phigg. Dufresne’s been stalling, ripping him off. I promised I’d get the car back.”

It was the best kind of lie—mostly truth. And because Montreal knew how Ollie was really spending his time here, it would be easy for him to believe Ollie was stalling Phigg.

Montreal head-motioned to muscle man, who kept an eye on me while he raised the car cover enough to open the passenger door.

Montreal said, “We will find the car registered to, what was the unusual name, Tander Phigg?” His poker face wasn’t as good as he thought. The name lit him up, flared his nostrils, dilated his pupils for a few tenths of a second.

“Tander Phigg
Junior,
if you want to be precise,” I said, confirming the flared nostrils.

“You said the car
was
his. Please explain the use of the past tense.”

“He’s dead,” I said. Montreal raised the eyebrows again while muscle man shuffled through the glove box. I gave a thirty-second version of all the stuff he would confirm in the newspapers, leaving Trey Phigg out of it. If Montreal knew about Trey at all, he thought he was in Vietnam. No need to correct him.

As I finished up, muscle man read the registration, nodded to Montreal, and began to button up the car and cover.

“If Mister Phigg is dead,” Montreal said, “for whom do you want the car?”

I licked my lips and looked down. “I was helping Tander get it back.”

“This we have established. But who is your patron
now
?”

“I put in a lot of time,” I said, refusing to look him in the eye. “A lot of hours.”

“You came to steal this car.”

I said nothing. We all stood and looked at each other. I tried to act nervous—licked my lips, flicked my gaze from the gun to Montreal—and finally said, “Now what are
you
fellas doing here? Not that it’s my business.”

“Time for all of us to go, I think,” Montreal said.

Montreal left first. Muscle man gestured me out next, then came after and had me close the window tight. As we rounded the building, he put on a black Windbreaker that had been tied around his waist, zipped it up, and tucked the ugly machine pistol inside.

While Montreal watched me climb into my truck, muscle man stood fifteen feet away in my blind spot. I could try to lean over, reach the P35 beneath the seat, come back up, and fling a half-assed shot at Montreal, but muscle man would cut me in half.

Montreal made a cranking motion with one long-fingered hand. I rolled down my window.

“He’s memorized your license plate now,” he said, flicking his head toward muscle man. “In addition to your other data. Please don’t come back. If you do, he will kill you.”

I nodded, rolled up my window, drove away. “Shit,” I said out loud, pounding the wheel. I was pissed I’d gone inside without a gun. The address on my driver’s license was Shrewsbury. Montreal now knew where Charlene lived.

*   *   *

The church basement we used for Barnburner meetings, Saint Anne’s, was booked that night. But Mary Giarusso figured the Phigg name might still carry weight in Fitchburg and made a few calls. It worked: She got us the Odd Fellows hall on the cheap.

Me, Charlene, and Sophie rolled in at quarter of eight. There were only a half dozen Barnburners so far, and most of them stood around grumbling that the memorial was too far from our home base.

To offset the ingrates, my first move was to find Mary Giarusso and thank her for getting us the hall. She’s the one who makes the Barnburners go: She updates the telephone tree, buys cards for sobriety anniversaries, keeps us in good standing with AA National. Like that.

She’s slowing down some in her late seventies, forgetting things here and there. I worry about her. I worry more about what’ll happen to the Barnburners when she’s gone. The world ships us new drunks all the time, but even the ones that stick around don’t want responsibility. Mary says getting them sober is the easy part these days; it’s getting them involved that’s hard.

Mary, Charlene, and a few others shuttled Swedish meatballs and pigs in a blanket from the kitchen to the stainless-steel warming trays. A DJ whose name I always forget set up his speakers. Barnburners filtered in. Sophie was in a corner with two other girls her age, sipping generic soda from cans and pretending not to look at a couple of boys somebody’d brought along.

I looked around and thought about what a weird tradition this was. Part AA meeting, part wake, part roast, part sock hop. Strictly a Barnburner thing—I’d asked around, and nobody knew of another group that did it. I’d invited Trey and his family, but when I explained how the get-together would go, he passed. I didn’t blame him.

At the stroke of eight the DJ hit a button on his laptop and slammed out an old doo-wop song,
way
too loud. Mary Giarusso walked straight over and made him turn it down. He looked sour about it but didn’t dare say no to Mary.

I spent the next forty-five minutes talking with various Barnburners about Phigg. Everybody had heard some true things and some bullshit. I confirmed the true, waved off the bullshit. I didn’t sugarcoat or minimize anything. That would be an insult to all drunks.

Butch Feeley, one of the oldest old-timers and the unofficial boss of the meeting-after-the-meeting crew, shuffled up, grabbed my sleeve, and said over a doo-wop song, “Tander’s sponsor ought to say a few words.”

“Who
was
his sponsor?”

“We were hoping you knew.”

I didn’t. Yelled in Butch’s ear that I’d figured it must be him or one of the other old-timers.

He shook his head. “I sponsored Tander until ’oh-one,” he said. “We had words over some foolish thing. He told me to go fuck myself, and we haven’t spoken three words to each other since. I asked around, and most of the other old farts have similar stories.”

I said, “Fucking Phigg.”

Butch shook his head and looked at me with wet old man’s eyes. “No, shame on us,” he said. “All of us. He pushed us away and we let him.”

We locked eyes for maybe five seconds. I wanted to fight Butch on that. But I couldn’t. He was right. “Shame on us,” I said. “Shame on
me
. I’ll say the words.”

He clapped my shoulder and shuffled off.

I stood alone and watched the party. It was jumping. Sophie and the other girls were chewing the DJ’s ear, wanting newer songs so they could dance with each other. Little knots of people ate pigs in a blanket, drank from plastic cups, laughed.

Across the room, Charlene had been cornered by Chester Bagley, another meeting-after-the-meeting old-timer. His wig had slipped eight or ten degrees west. Every time he made a point, he put his hand on Charlene’s waist. Every time she replied, he leaned in like he couldn’t hear and slid the hand down to her rear end. The Barnburner ladies called him “Chester the Molester.”

I waited for eye contact with Charlene and made a show of slapping my own ass, giving her a big thumbs-up. She about spit ginger ale on the floor, then used her free hand on her head to show how far Chester’s toupee had slipped.

I laughed, went to the DJ, and asked him to kill the music.

The sudden silence got everybody’s attention. They looked my way.

I waited for stray conversations to end, then said what we always say at these things. I’d been to maybe two dozen of them but had never spoken the words before. My throat tightened even as I started with the easy part. “I’m Conway,” I said. “I’m an alcoholic and a drug addict.”

“Hi, Conway.”

“Barnburner Tander has achieved the goal we all strive for.”

“What is the goal?”

“To die sober.”

“We raise a glass to Tander.”
Everybody did.

“This is an anonymous program, but a glorious death deserves fame.”

“And fame means a last name.”

“We drink to Tander Phigg Junior. Sober as a judge, dead as a doornail.”

“Sober as a judge, dead as a doornail.”

Everybody drank.

The little ditty was a Barnburner tradition before I got here. The first time I heard it, I grabbed an old-timer’s sleeve and asked what the hell we’d just said—and why. The old-timer, Eudora Spoon, had laughed and patted my hand. “Everybody asks that,” she’d said, and walked away.

Now I looked around. The new drunks looked as puzzled as I had that night. I watched them buttonhole old-timers the same way I had. I watched some of the old-timers cry, watched kids stare because they weren’t sure why people were crying.

The DJ played a doo-wop song. Either he loved doo-wop or he thought we did. I made my way toward Charlene but felt a tug at my sleeve. It was Sophie. She said something. I couldn’t make it out over the doo-wop, so I cupped an ear and leaned.

She said, “Is that all he gets?”

“Who?”

“The one who died. Tander Phigg.”

“I guess it is, yeah.”

“It’s not much, is it?”

“You’d be surprised,” I said.

She put out her hands and smiled goofy. It took me a few seconds to see she wanted to dance.

Hell.

I took and danced her. Sheesh, she was almost up to my chest. I looked over at Charlene. She smiled and put her hands together over her heart.

We danced, me and Sophie.

*   *   *

An hour later, as the get-together broke up, I climbed into the passenger seat of Charlene’s Volvo SUV. I’d left my cell in the cup holder. I had four missed calls and two voice mails, all from my house. Both messages were Trey saying call him ASAP. I did.

“Is your father Fred Sax?” Trey said. “Frederic J. Sax, let me see…” He said a Social Security number.

“What about him?” I said. Charlene and Sophie picked up on my tone, stopped talking, and looked my way.

“The hospital called,” Trey said.

“What hospital?”

“Cider Hill State Hospital.” From the way he said it, I could tell he’d Googled the place.

My insides slipped. My heart hurt. My eyes closed. I said, “Should I go there now?”

“Not at this point,” he said. “They told me if I couldn’t get hold of you right away, you might as well wait until tomorrow morning.”

I clicked off.

Charlene said, “What?”

“My father’s in the nuthouse,” I said.

Sophie started to speak, then swallowed it.

“What?” I said.

“It’s Father’s Day,” she said.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Next morning, big sun at my back, I drove west on Route 9. Soon I banged a right into the New England that leaf-peepers dream about—elms, oaks, some pines mixed in. As the road passed a big pond on my left and grew twistier, houses petered out.

I came around a corner and there it was, spoiling a pretty field: a big red-brick insane asylum. Mesh-reinforced doors, barred windows, uniformed security patrols, the works.

As I pulled in, I saw parking places marked
PICKUP
/
DROP
-
OFF ONLY
. I said out loud, “Just like Applebee’s.” Laughed, knew the laugh sounded wrong.

I killed the F-150, sat a minute to let my heart slow. I’d been here before on taxi duty, hauling people from the nuthouse to the private rehab up the street.

I climbed out into a day that was good and hot already, then pulled a door and stepped inside. At first, Cider Hill State Hospital looked no different than any other health-care operation: It was full of women with big asses who obviously hated their jobs. Everything they did they did slowly, almost cartoon-slow. Like it was a joke they played on outsiders, and the second you turned your back they sped up.

But I knew they didn’t.

I stood at a counter while three of them keyboard-clacked and had a contest to see who could avoid making eye contact with me.